AWKWARD ZOMBIE

@Le Great Handsome Oppressor: Fair enough. I feel like I've been told this before, but my memory is for naught. I will try and rely on the proletariats to mediate a little more, byut hopefully I won't have to very often. I'm honestly not lookking for a fight.

@Syobon: MMMMMAAAAAAAAAAATH!!!!!

@SaintCrazy: You're right... also, that fix didn't work, but you tried to help and I thank you for it.

I'm assuming he means the verb "to jerk" which would be derivative of the attempt to accelerate, since jerking an accelerating object impedes it. But that doesn't make sense because derivative doesn't mean to impede or "the opposite."

Seems a bit too complicated for a joke.

i just saw the Ds and thought it was a dick joke

I'd assume it's because the third derivative is the change in the change in the change of the motion, so it's altering how it should be acting, a bit like jerking something affects its motion?

But then that's a bit arbitrary, since the same could be said of a second derivative and movement is so messy in the real world that you have infinite derivatives you can apply to any real motion, so it could even be fourth or fifth or seventeenth derivative.

Maybe it's just a arbitrary technical term?

Edit: whoops yep technical term and I guess not so terribly arbitrary. Any higher derivative could still fit, I think, though.

Please stay on topic.

Well I had the decency to tell you to check the steam forums before I started poking fun. Any of the millions of users who have steam must have had a similar problem.

Continuing off topic discussion in science thread.

Well, bad news, gang. I decided I would try to add my voice to whatever few there were complaining about this offline mode issue on the official Steam forums. Now, I've seen many, many Google results about people making hundreds of topics about this problem elsewhere- Yahoo Answers, Gamespot (shockingly), other such gaming sites, yet when I scan the "Already Suggested" thread, it doesn't show. I thought for sure it'd be a major suggestion.

Even more disconcerting, there doesn't seem to be any mention of it anywhere on the forums, which is pretty suspicious, almost like Steam is trying to suppress dissent. An exaggeration, perhaps, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were keeping me and many others down just so they wouldn't have to fix this "glitch" which would breach their surveillence abilities. Can't have that, can they?

Worse, when I tried posting and creating a new thread, I'm told I have no privileges to do either. Making topics I get since I'm a newbie there, but I can't even post? Makes me wonder what the point of registering and linking to my Steam account is worth if I can't discuss anything.

I really want this to change. There are better ways of managing offline security and lanti-piracy methods; there was a news post saying they updated L4D2, but they also updated the demo. I'm starting to think Steam isn't evil, it's just batshit crazy and has its priorities out of whack. I WANT to be angry right now, but honestly I'm... kinda worried. Are these the hands holding the future of computer gaming?

Yeah, Valve is pretty unorganized and employees just work on whatever they want. Good for creativity, not so good for making stuff work reliably.

I highly doubt there's any conspiracy going on here.

I know this bug only happens sometimes, some people have never gotten it at all, and most people don't play Offline Mode too often anyway.

I also have no idea whether the Steam forums are actually useful for figuring out bugs and such.

Apparently not. The way things are going, all the higher-ups run Steam like it's their playground and we are their Sims. They may strike us down when they wish, for no reason at all. Communists....

I'll leave the topic up for a day or two longer, see if anybody else wants to stumble on in. If not, I'll lock it before next week. Thanks to the people who gave serious suggestions, and kudos to everyone else's sense of humor. I mean that.

Uh

Valve doesn't have higher-ups

Everyone in the company is equal and they all do whatever they want

That is bodaciously exactly how the company is set up

This isn't a conspiracy it's just poor organization

Yeah the reason HL3 isn't out is probably less because they're waiting for something and probably more because they don't want to work on it that much at the moment.
Valve is really super unstructured and it's basically where people go to work however they want. Like it's been said, good for creativity, bad for actually doing things. There's no conspiracy, nobody is playing with anyone, and there's no malice behind it.

It's a bug, and nobody has fixed it because it affects almost nobody. You just ended up the unfortunate statistical outlier.

They do have dedicated support people though.

Steam Forums probably aren't the best place to look for help honestly. Medic, try using this to get the problem resolved. It may take a few days for them to get back to you so just be patient. The guys you'll be dealing with are indeed there to help you so just explain the problem as clearly as you can and try to keep it civil.

Edit: And I just noticed Lambeth suggested the same thing about 8 hours before me.